Matthew Lippman

THE PATHOLOGY OF CURRENCY

You build a bank. You put money in it.
No one knows how much money is in it.

Not even you know how much money is in it.
You deposit 1000 dollars and it’s a mystery.

You take out 1000 dollars and it’s a conundrum.
When you look at the statement the statement says 5 dollars.

How did that get there? Was it a bird with a five-dollar bill?
No. It was five birds with five one-dollar bills.

But there’s still 25 cents left after you spend the 5 bucks on an acre of land in Vermont.
When you were a kid, you could buy a slice of pizza from Village Pizza for a quarter.

You wish you could get a slice for a quarter, now. No.
You wish you were a kid running across the street,

dodging cabs and buses and bullets
to play stoop ball with your pals. That’s funny.

You never used the word “pals” when you were a kid.
Never used that word when you were an adult.

Now that you are an adult you use the word “boys” or the word “brothers.”
Funny how you only got that far.

You got far enough to build a bank with a vault and some safe deposit boxes.
But there’s nothing in there, only clouds of money

that evaporate onto steel and granite and leave you befuddled.
It boggles your mind, and all your panic attacks are dollar kamikaze bombers.

You go across the street for a slice. You smack 5 dollars down on the counter
and there is a thousand dollars out there, floating around between memory and desire,

denial and survival.
The cheese is so hot it burns your tongue.

The sauce drips down your arm
in dollar signs.

MATTHEW LIPPMAN won the 2018 Levis Prize for his collection Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful (Four Way Books). His next collection, We Are All Sleeping with Our Sneakers On, will be published by Four Way Books in 2024.